Argentine-born French filmmaker Nelly Kaplan died today in a hospital in Geneva, Switzerland at age 89 of Covid. A writer and an icon of the French New Wave, she’s best known for her 1969 cult film A Very Curious Girl / La Fiancée du pirate, a feminist revenge farce.
A native Argentine of Russian-Jewish descent, Kaplan was born in Buenos Aires on April 11, 1931, She studied Economics at the University of Buenos Aires, and migrated to France in the early fifties. In Paris, he met filmmaker Abel Gance (Napoléon), developing a personal and professional relationship with him. She collaborated with Gance in Magirama (1956) and The Battle of Austerlitz (1960).
During the sixties, Kaplan directed several documentary short films in the form of artists’ portraits including Rodolphe Bresdin (1962), Gustave Moreau (1962), Abel Gance, hier et demain (1963), and The Picasso Look (1967). These documentary short played successfully at various international festivals.
In 1969 she made her debut feature film A Very Curious Girl, about an oppressed and exploited young woman who begins charging for her sexual favors and completely disrupts the smug patriarchal capitalist society of a small rural village. The film proved to be polemic and it became a cult classic.
Other film titles include Papa, the Lil' Boats (1971), A Young Emmanuelle (1976), Charles and Lucie (1979), and The Pleasure of Love (1991). In 1984 Kaplan directed Abel Gance and His Napoléon, on the odyssey for her late mentor into his 1927 masterpiece, using rare and previously unseen material.
In addition to her film career, she was an accomplished writer, journalist, writing on film theory and criticism, and surrealist fiction. In 2019, the Quad Cinema presented “Wild Things: The Ferocious Films of Nelly Kaplan.” the first-ever New York retrospective of the “defiant artist who still feels ahead of her time.”
